'Through a caring and courageous ethnographical endeavor, The promise of violence offers an intricate analysis of a revolutionary temporality that unfolds and finds meaning simultaneously in the past, present, and future. In that very sense, the book advances an anthropology of history through which it situates revolutionaries in perpetual yearning for the realization of messianic futures and global justice. Saramifar has produced a remarkable piece of scholarship that is going to be the subject of conversation for many years to come in anthropology, memory, and Iranian studies.'Behrooz Ghamari-Tabrizi, Princeton, the author of The Long War on Iran: New Events, Old Questions'Younes Saramifar delivers a dazzling and intellectually fearless book. With a uniquely empathetic touch, this study traverses multiple disciplines to uncover the paradoxes of revolution through a close reading of one of the greatest examples: Iran. Both conceptually bold and deeply personal, this work of rare erudition will leave a lasting imprint on debates about the politics of memory, revolutions, and the Iranian experience in particular.'Arshin Adib-Moghaddam, SOAS, the author of What is Iran? and Psycho-nationalism: Global Thought, Iranian ImaginationsRevolutionaries in Iran choose to identify memories of the Iran-Iraq War as their ‘collective’ memory to mark the war era as the temporal reference in history – the time of times, or sometimes even a time beyond time. Can a sole event and its violence truly become – for some – the all-encompassing, constituting element of history and memory? This book pursues this question and follows revolutionaries in the maze of ‘collective’ memory to offer a temporal account of the breakdown of happenings – as well as the mending of happenings through the force of remembrance. -- .
